The MexicoBlog of the CIP Americas Program monitors and analyzes international press on Mexico with a focus on the US-backed War on Drugs in Mexico and the struggle in Mexico to strengthen the rule of law, justice and protection of human rights. Relevant political developments in both countries are also covered.

A Disastrous Metaphor: Waging Domestic War

How the metaphor of ‘war’ came to define US law and policy on drugs and other major social issues

J. Reed Brundage, Ph.D.

A review and summary of “The Model of War” (Journal ofPolitical Theory, April 1, 2010; v. 38: pp. 214-242) by Jeremy Elkins, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science of Bryn Mawr College.

Following theSpanish-American Warthe U.S. acquired thePhilippinesfrom Spain. At that time, opium addiction constituted a significant problem in the civilian population of the Philippines. It was also a significant and growing social problem in the continental United States, especially among immigrants of Chinese descent. (China had been forced to accept the importation of opium, which it previously banned, as the outcome of Britain’s “Opium Wars” in the mid-nineteenth century. Britain wanted to import opium into China to pay for its purchase of tea.)

Charles Henry Brent, an American Episcopal bishop who served as Missionary Bishop of the Philippines, convened a Commission of Inquiry, known as theBrent Commission, for the purpose of examining alternatives to a licensing system for opium addicts. The Commission recommended that narcotics should be subject to international control. The recommendations of the Brent Commission were endorsed by theUnited States Department of Stateand in 1906 PresidentTheodore Rooseveltcalled for an international conference, which was held in Shanghai in February 1909. A second conference was held atThe Haguein May 1911, and out of it came the first international drug control treaty, theInternational Opium Conventionof 1912. (From: Wikipedia.org)

Following on these international actions, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was passed in part to keep opium away from Chinese immigrants, marijuana from Mexican immigrants, and cocaine from Negroes. This law began the United States prohibition-centered ‘war on drugs’. Nearly sixty years later, the administration of President Richard Nixon achieved the passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and began the current battle in the ‘War on Drugs’. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan instituted his own surge in this ‘War’. (See America's Crusade, Time Magazine, 09.15.1986). This ‘war’continues unabated today. For Mexico, our next-door neighbor, it has become an actual, armed war.

The dire consequences ofthe application of the paradigm or metaphor of ‘war’ to frame the drug issue is clearly stated in the introduction to After the War on Drugs, Blueprint for Regulation, published in 2009 by the London-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation:

"...the presentation of drugs as an existential ‘threat’ has generated a policy response within which (scientifically unsupported) and radical measures are justified. Drug policy has evolved within a context of ‘securitization’, characterized by increasing powers and resources for enforcement and state security apparatus. The outcomes of this strategy, framed as a drug ‘war’, include the legitimization of propaganda, and the suspension of many of the working principles that define more conventional social policy, health or legal interventions.

Given that the War on Drugs is predicated on ‘eradication’ of the ‘evil’ drug threat as a way of achieving a ‘drug free world’, it has effectively established a permanent state of war. This has led to a high level policy environment that ignores critical scientific thinking, and health and social policy norms. Fighting the threat becomes an end in itself and as such, it creates a largely self-referential and self-justifying rhetoric that makes meaningful evaluation, review and debate difficult, if not impossible.

One has to ask: How did the paradigm of ‘war’ gain such power, becoming the controlling framework for defining the issue of psychotropic drugs use and for determining government response to their use in the United States, and – through the United Nations’ Conventions on Drugs – in the world? How did war become our world-view?

In his paper, “The Model of War”(Journal ofPolitical Theory, April 1, 2010; v. 38: pp. 214-242), Professor Elkins addresses this question with great insight. He analyzes the penchant of the United States presidents, over the past half-century, to apply the metaphor of ‘war’ not only to the drug issue but also to othermajor social issues – cancer, poverty and crime – thereby defining their character and creating a paradigm that determines the policies and laws enacted to address them. The metaphor also establishes the media’s presentation and the public’s understanding of these issues.(Professor Elkins also analyzes the domestic dimensions of the ‘War on Terror,’ a most serious matter, but not part of our focus here. An earlier version of the paper was entitled “The Metaphor of War.”)

In essence, Professor Elkins’ answer to the question, “Why ‘war’?” is: by applying the paradigm of ‘war’ metaphorically to social problems, the government ‘constructs’ or transformsthose problems into enemies external to the body politic – that is, to the government and the citizenry. This transformation frees the body politic of any responsibility for the problems and justifies strategies, actions and funding designed to counter-attack, conquer and eradicate these alien invaders from our land. This paper reviews and summarizes Professor Elkins’ analysis of how this transformation has been effected in each of the ‘metaphorical wars’ against cancer, poverty, crime and drugs.

The Long History of ‘Metaphorical Wars’

Elkins relates the use of the metaphor of ‘war’ to define social issues and set social policy and law to the US victory in World War II and the onset of the Cold War. However, such use actually goes back more than a century, to just after the end of the Civil War. The beginning of the Women´s Christian Temperance Union, in 1873, lay in ‘Women’s Crusades’— protest demonstrations held at saloons and stores that sold liquor. This crusade ‘achieved victory’ with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920. The Harrison Act of 1914 was passed in this context. After World War I, the WCTU declared a ‘world war on liquor’, seeking to expand prohibition of liquor sales world-wide. Prohibition led to a virtual real war against the rum runners. When Prohibition ended in 1933, J. Edgar Hoover,director of what was to become the FBI, launched a ‘war on crime’, against bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde.

The Cold War against communism, which dominated government policy and the public consciousness for forty years, served as the context for the use of the metaphor of war in the second half of the twentieth century. It also served as a model for attacking citizens of the United States who were perceived as internal enemies.

The Psychological and Political Function of Metaphor: Transforming political problems into alien enemies

Metaphors, together with symbols, are the language of what Sigmund Freud called ‘primary process’, as differentiated from the ‘secondary process’ of rational thought. They are the language of the emotional part of our minds. Felt emotions are the outcomes of our unconscious, instinctive and instantaneous evaluations of aspects of the world as supportive of (good) or dangerous (bad) for our personal well-being, that is, for our survival. When this evaluation assesses something as dangerous, our instinctive reaction is one of ‘fight or flight’. To use the metaphor of war to define a reality in our world as an ‘enemy’, to be ‘fought’ via an ‘attack’,connects our perception of that reality directly to this instinctive, primal emotional reaction.

Elkins analyzes the political functions of using the emotionally charged metaphor of ‘war’, to define social and political problems. Through the metaphor of ‘war’, the government constructs or transforms domestic issues into alien ‘others’, ‘foreign enemies’ perceived as invading forces. This expulsion of problems from the body politic and their projection onto external ‘enemies’ enables both politicians and citizens to:

i)Deny the problems’ origins within the political and economic system of the nation and thus deny any responsibility for their existence.

ii)Maintain the illusion that the nation and its citizens are healthy, whole and good.

iii)Take actions justified as necessary to ‘defend’ the citizens who are defined as ‘victims’ of the ‘attacks’of the ‘enemy’.

As these ‘enemies – poverty, crime and drugs – are, in reality, abstractions that cannot actually be ‘attacked’, the target of such ‘attacks’readily becomes people perceived as carriers or purveyors of the enemy danger, most specifically, the poor, African-Americans and others perceived as outcasts from the body politic.

The following analysis of the wars on cancer, crime and drugs is abstracted from Professor Elkins’ paper.

The ‘War on Cancer’: Making the internal into the external

Elkins sets the stage: Cancer is a disease characterized by the inability of the body to regulate the abnormal growth of cells. It can also be approached as a public health issue when environmental causes are considered. However, when President Nixon declared a ‘war on cancer’, describing it as “one of mankind’s deadliestand most elusive enemies,” and Congress passed the National Cancer Act of 1971 to “advance the national attack upon cancer,” cancer became defined in terms of an external enemy.

This definition of cancer as an external enemy made it possible for the government and government funding to avoid addressing what Dr. Samuel Epstein, a leading cancer researcher and critic of the ‘war’ model, described as, “a strong body of scientific evidence point[ing] to the role of run-awayindustrial technologies [as] the predominant cause of the modern cancer epidemic.”

Thus, as Elkins writes, “The declaration of war asserts that cancer is... not even partly of our making.…The nation [is], in its true essence, innocent of cancer and thus always and only avictim and a defender of the health of the nation.”

The ‘War on Poverty’: Making victims into the enemy

Initially, the ‘War on Poverty’, as defined by President Johnson...was anattack on poverty’s causes, seen at least partly as lying inthe failures of the body politic. However, attacking these causes would have required major political confrontations with national, state and local government political powers, structures and laws that benefited the middle and upper classes. Therefore, Elkins deduces, “The Johnson administration…framed (the anti-poverty program) in a way that did not threaten the interests of middle class voters. [It] largely avoided taking on directly federal, state, and local policies that benefited various segments of the middle class.”

Subsequently, poverty was described by Johnson as “the most ancient of mankind’s enemies,” now to “be driven from the land…”; hence, the war on poverty came to be fought not as though it were a remedy for a defect of the bodypolitic, but as though it were aimed at a condition that was not our own.

Elkins sums up: As the ‘war on poverty’ “…came to be fought as though povertywere a foreign enemy, [it] increasingly came to treat the poor themselves… asan entity outside of the body politic.…Theshadow of the alien ‘enemy’ easily fell upon those who…lived outside of the mainstream ofAmerican society. The ‘war’ became a…means for ‘pacifying’ the black, urban ghettoes.”

The ‘War on Crime’: War becomes a Moral Crusade

Elkins: “…The war on crime presents crime not as a consequence...of any general failure of the body politic, but, again, as something that comes wholly uponthe nation from without.” [Emphasis added]

Elkins continues: “Significantly different from the other two ‘wars’, the externalization of crime from the nationrelies…on an act ofmoral judgment.... The nation´s perceived character isdefined not by its reality, including whatever itmay have done to help create conditions of crime. In the ‘war on crime’, the nation´s character is defined by its moral stance against crime.

“Citizens and their political leaders are united precisely by perceiving themselvesasidentical withthe moral ideal, theconscience, of its members.… They sharethe collective fantasy that the nation, by identifying itself with what it would like tobe, does not consistin what itdoes. Consequently, what is ‘outside’ the nation is determined by moral disapproval. [I]ncondemning crime, the nation … distinguishes itself from [crime]… casting off whatever aspects of social liferun against the moral law as foreign to it. [Emphasis added]

“The nation and its members, identified with the morally good, are then perceived solely as victims of crime.… Every criminal act…against a member isthus(transformed into) an act of war against the ideal that binds the nation. Therefore, the war on crime (is presented as a) defensivewar by that nation in the name of that ideal.” Such a war is a crusade.

Elkins continues: “On the other side of the moral law stand those who commit acts of crime.…Particularcriminal acts, and those who commit them, are defined as...external to the body politic and as an invasion of it. These hostile persons are… an alien entitylivinginthe body politic, but not reallyofit.

The language of war alsoencourages the idea that individual acts of crime are part of a collective criminalforce, an enemyarmy arrayed against the nation.… Reagan’s first Attorney General, EdwinMeese … described that war in no uncertain terms: as part of a centuries-old attempt to maintain ‘Western Civilization’ against a ‘barbarian- type’invasion. Criminals...are distinguishedfrom citizens, and…made into an organized enemy…no longer individual citizens,but an ‘element’.

Elkins concludes: “The metaphor of a war on crime also may easily, and …morechillingly, lead... to the conception of certain classes of persons as criminal-types. Thewar on crime…has notoriously been fought as a war against the ghettoes, and it hasincreasing been fought with the use of military-style tactics. Racial profiling has targeted wholeclasses of persons as criminally disposed.”

The ‘War on Drugs’: The metaphor creates a real war

By applying the metaphor of ‘war’ to the issue of psychotropic drug use, the government has defined the problem as one of ‘enemy’ drugs themselves and their supply, rather than one of the physiological, psychological and social forces that lead to drug use. The response, therefore, has been one prohibiting the supplying, sale and use of these drugs. Police, courts, prisons and military actions have been the primary instruments funded and used to ‘wage the war’.

As Elkins writes, “The war on drugs … has differed from... the rest of the war on crime in animportant respect. The war on crime has …been primarily associated withaggressive or violent street crimes … [In contrast] the war on drugs has included prominently in the enemycamp non-violent drug users—by far the largest category of drug arrestees.”

Elkins goes on to say, “From the beginning…, thekinds of users… targeted by the war on drugs were also identified with groups… that were conceived as dangerous to the body politic independent of any criminal activityand independent of any threat to the individual bodies of others. Initially these ‘enemy’ groups were identified as the ‘counter-culture’.”

President Nixon, in private, but recorded, comments to his aides, directly tied these groups to the Cold War:

Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general, these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff;they’re trying to destroy us.

As Elkins points out, “Since the Reagan administration’s escalation on the war on drugs, theprimary target has been not the left or a counter-culture... [The target is] a racialized underclass. The common image of the drug userduring the years of the Reagan and first Bush administration was the black, ghetto crack addict,and the war on drugs has particularly targeted poorer African-Americans.…The war on drugs thus further fused [three] categories of outsider: the poor, blacks and the criminal, conceived as alien to the nation and its constitutive morality, hostile to it, and asneeding to be contained.”

Elkins adds, “The main argument for the drug war is theeffect that drugs have on the character of their users and on the social fabric. William J. Bennett, the first President Bush’s first ‘drug czar’, argued:

The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument. [Emphasis added] A citizen in a drug-induced haze… is not what the founding fathers meant by the ‘pursuitof happiness’....[O]ur nation’s notion of liberty is rooted in the ideal of a ‘self-reliantcitizenry’. The war against drugs is primarily motivated…by the intrinsically destructive nature of drugs and the toll they exact from our society.

Elkins concludes: “What makes [particular drugs – and not others, like alcohol and cigarettes]...the object of a...war… is that their use [is seen as] corrupt[ing] not merely the body and person of the user, but the body andcharacter of the nation itself. The individual user thus appears not... as victim, but asaggressor: for in attacking her own body, she attacks the nation.… The enemy[resides]… in classes of users who threaten to do to the nation what they have done tothemselves. [Thus], the ‘War on Drugs’ is a defensive battle for the soul of the nation.”

World War III (or IV): The Internationalization of the War on Drugs

Because many of the drugs whose use is problematic come from other countries, the United States has, since the 1970’s, used the United Nations to pressure other nations to adopt the same paradigm of a ‘War on Drugs’. Through a series of UN Conventions, an international mandate has been created that extends this‘War on Drugs’ around the world.

In1998 a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS)was held to evaluatethe effectiveness of the current repressive drug control regime.Mexico was the country that originally called for the 1998 UNGASS, aspiring to convene a forum for in-depth evaluation of global drug control policy.[Emphasis added] However, during the preparatory phase at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND),an annual council of UN member nations, the effort at evaluation backfired and the UNGASS was reoriented towards an affirmation of prohibitionism, despite the obvious failure of current drug control policies. The General Assembly, in their consequent political declaration, gave the UN International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP)the mandate "...to develop strategies with a view to eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008". (From 2003 and 2005 papers by Martin Jelsma,Co-ordinator, Transnational Institute Drugs & DemocracyProgramme)

The self-defense argument described by Elkins is reflected in the United Nations’ WorldDrug Report of 2009. Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of theUnited Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (note the official merger of the two ‘wars’), writes in the Preface to the Executive Summary:

The end of the first century of drug control (it all startedin Shanghai in 1909) coincided with the closing of the…decade launched in 1998 by a GeneralAssembly Special Session on Drugs. These anniversariesstimulated reflection on the effectiveness, and the limitations,of drug policy.The review resulted in the reaffirmationthat illicit drugs continue to pose a healthdanger to humanity. That’s why drugs are, and shouldremain, controlled.With this sanction in mind,MemberStates confirmed unequivocal support for the UN Conventionsthat have established the world drug controlsystem.[Emphasis added]

Mr. Costa goes on to state, “Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled– they are controlled because they are harmful.” [Emphasis added] And further, he links the international ‘war on drugs’ to the international ‘war on crime’. (It was Mr. Acosta who achieved the merger of the UN Office on Crime with his Office on Drugs.)

The most serious issue concerns organized crime.All market activity controlled by …authority generatesparallel, illegal transactions. Drug controls have generated a criminal marketof macro-economic dimensions that uses violence and corruptionto mediate between demand and supply.TheUNODC is well aware of the threats posedby international drug mafias. … we have highlighted the security menaceposed by organized crime. --…Having started this drugs/crime debate, and havingpondered it extensively,we have concluded that thesedrug-related, organized crime arguments are valid. Theymust be addressed. I urge governments to recalibrate the policy mix, without delay, in the direction of more controlson crime, without fewer controls on drugs. [Emphasis added]

The War Becomes Real in Mexico

Mexico is one of the nations from which or through which the prohibited drugs are supplied to the United States, the largest market in the world. This is, in part, because the ‘War on Drugs’ shut down supply routes from South America that passed through Florida.

Mexican President Calderon, upon his inauguration in 2006, initiated a literal War on Drugs, using the Mexican army and Federal police to attack the cartels that had grown up in the 1990’s to meet US demand. The United States, through the Merida Initiative, and its own domestic programs in the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and Justice, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, politically and economically supports President Calderon and the Mexican government in this war. The US illegal drug market supplies the Mexican cartels with billions of dollars per year to fund their side of thar.

This War has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. It furthers the corruption of the Mexican government. It sows fear in the Mexican people and undermines the social fabric.

Given that the War on Drugs is predicated on ‘eradication’ of the ‘evil’ drug threat as a way of achieving a ‘drug free world’, it has effectively established a permanent state of war. This has led to a high level policy environment that ignores critical scientific thinking, and health and social policy norms. Fighting the threat becomes an end in itself and as such, it creates a largely self-referential and self-justifying rhetoric that makes meaningful evaluation, review and debate difficult, if not impossible.